Dragon Chimera - Final Submission

 This week I replaced the rigged model with the final model and refined the skinning in areas I didn't get to last week.

Dragon Chimera - Week 5

This week I refined the wing deformations and did a first of skinning with the final feather placement. The animation below was done by Tori.

 

The wing deformations are driven by aim constraints, following a ribbon being deformed by the four primary feather joint aims. The primary feather joints are driven by the wing rotation to maintain equal angle between their parent joint and the subsequent joint. When the wing compresses, this would cause the feathers to cross, so I added an expression to scale the primary aims driving the ribbon (effectively pulling them all into the center)

The expression is an offset asymptote with a clamp.

Since feathers should not have any stretch, I wrote a python script to quickly block skinning on all of the feathers -- the script finds the joints with the largest influence on a mesh and evenly weights the vertices to that joint or joints so the entire mesh has a the same values.

Dragon Chimera - Week 4

 This sprint, I revised the wing deformations and made another iteration of the IK/FK spine that is more stable when rotating and transferred the rig to the game-ready base model.

Dragon Chimera - Week 3

I started working with the feather placement to create feather joints with a dynamic aim constraint to drive their orientation.

 I've been making progress on fixing the gimbal issues on the IK spine by implementing a ribbon system to act as an intermediary between the skin joints and the IK joints. This is still a work in progress though.

I worked on getting a lattice deformer to support the use of motion paths to drive the IK skeleton but ultimately we decided the return on control was not worth the time it would take to debug fully.

Dragon Chimera - Week 2

 This week, I worked on the first pass of the full IK/FK rig on spine and limbs. I encountered some issues with rotation on the X-axis using purely joints on the IK spine, and will likely switch to a combination ribbon and spline IK for the next iteration.

I created a first pass range of motion animation for quickly testing the rig deformations and future functionality.

Additionally, I spent more time researching the mechanics of avian flight to better understand desired outcome of the feather rig.

Dragon Chimera - Week 1

 This week I researched rigging solutions for wings and long-bodied creatures (snakes / dragons) as well as setting up a basic FK rig so we can start on animation blocking early next sprint.

Lighting A Scene (Module 4)